Although plasma display panels are known for many years, plasma displays are encountering a growing interest from TV manufacturers. Indeed, this technology now makes it possible to achieve flat color panels of large size and with limited depths without any viewing angle constraints. The size of the displays may be much larger than the classical CRT picture tubes would have ever been allowed.
Referring to the latest generation of European TV sets, a lot of work has been made to improve its picture quality. Consequently, there is a strong demand, that a TV set built in a new technology like the plasma display technology has to provide a picture so good or better than the old standard TV technology. On one hand, the plasma display technology gives the possibility of nearly unlimited screen size, also of attractive thickness, but on the other hand, it generates new kinds of artefacts which could damage the picture quality. Most of these artefacts are different from the known artefacts occurring on classical CRT color picture tubes. Its mainly this different appearance of the artefacts which makes them more visible to the viewer since the viewer is used to see the well-known old TV artefacts.
The invention deals with a specific new artefact, which is called “dynamic false contour effect” since it corresponds to disturbances of grey levels and colors in the form of an apparition of colored edges in the picture when an observation point on the matrix screen moves. This kind of artefact is enhanced when the image has a smooth gradation like when the skin of a person is being displayed (e.g. displaying of a face or an arm, etc.). In addition, the same problem occurs on static images when observers are shaking their heads and that leads to the conclusion that such a failure depends on the human visual perception and happens on the retina of the eye.
Two approaches have been discussed to compensate for the false contour effect. As the false contour effect is directly related to the sub-field organization of the used plasma technology one approach is to make an optimization of the sub-field organization of the plasma display panels. The sub-field organization will be explained in greater detail below but for the moment it should be noted that it is a kind of decomposition of the 8-bit grey level in 8 or more lighting sub-periods. An optimization of such a picture encoding will have, indeed, a positive effect on the false contour effect. Nevertheless, such a solution can only slightly reduce the false contour effect amplitude but in any cases the effect will still occur and will be perceivable. Furthermore, sub-field organization is not a simple matter of design choice. The more sub-fields are allowed the less luminance the panel will be able to produce. So, optimization of the sub-field organization is only possible in a narrow range and will not eliminate this effect alone.
The second approach for the solution of above-mentioned problem is known under the expression “pulse equalization technique”. This technique is a more complex one. It uses equalizing pulses which are added or separated from the TV signal when disturbances of grey scales are foreseen. In addition, since the fact that the false contour effect is motion relevant, we need different pulses for each possible speed. That leads to the need of a big memory storing a number of big look-up tables (LUT) for each speed and there is a need of a motion estimator. Furthermore, since the false contour effect depends on the sub-field organization, the pulses have to be re-calculated for each new sub-field organization. However, the big disadvantage of this technique results from the fact that the equalizing pulses add failures to the picture to compensate for a failure appearing on the eye retina. Additionally, when the motion is increasing in the picture, there is a need to add more pulses to the picture and that leads to conflicts with the picture contents in case of very fast motion.